It’s no secret that I’m a big fan of blind tasting and I’d go as far to say I consider it to be the single best exercise from a studying perspective, as it requires you to pool together your ability to taste with your factual knowledge and come to a realistic, educated conclusion about what’s in your glass. For the wine professional, blind tasting is most useful for the purpose of removing bias. After all, as human beings we’re essentially the product of our own experiences and our view of the world is largely defined by that, meaning that it’s incredibly hard to be truly objective about…well…anything, really. Now, fortunately wine isn’t something that divides opinion in the same way that politics and religion do, but I still hear quite a lot of regular commentary showcasing clear and obvious bias one way or the other. Common examples include:
“I don’t like Chardonnay, it’s just too oaky for me”
“I find Spanish wines to be overly extracted and alcoholic”
“Xarel.lo seems to be pretty limited in terms of its quality potential” – Confession: This one was me last year and I’ve since eaten my words several times over, although I’ve still yet to be convinced of it’s consistency at a high level. Time will tell and perhaps I’ll be eating this statement as well!
You get the idea. I even have a friend who regularly disparages New World wines as a general category; you know, those 7 or 8 enormous countries that regularly produce top quality wine from 3 different continents across hundreds of individual regions, often with many decades of wine-making under their belts. You’ll find people who only drink wines from certain regions; the British are notorious Francophiles, for example, and I’ve met wine drinkers in London who rarely venture outside of Bordeaux, Burgundy and the Rhone, although market forces are slowly squeezing all but the wealthiest of drinkers out of that particular corner of the vinous world. There have been several examples where even respected wine critics struggle to be objective when faced with a famous label, potentially a wine fetching hundreds of even thousands of euros a bottle, with even the vocabulary used to describe the wines changing to suit the occasion.
Enter; blind tasting. Stripped of the knowledge of what’s in your glass, the drinker has to rely on their own ability to taste and conclude about the level of quality themselves. No falling back on theoretical knowledge here; that Chave Hermitage should taste quite spectacular considering the €200+ price label assigned to it, but does it really? There’s only one way to find out. Put it amongst a group of other Syrahs from around the world, in a bottle with no label and get tasting. Now granted, this does require a taster of some experience and skill, with a quality matrix for determining how good the product is. Even then there are individual factors that could throw the results one way or the other but it’s the closest thing to an objective assessment as possible and an awful lot better than being invited to a beautiful Chateaux, being treated like royalty and then pretending that you can still be objective about the €100 glass of wine in front of you. “I’m 90 points on that!”
The real trick is to differentiate between your system for objective quality, and what you personally enjoy in a bottle of wine. As everyone in the world enjoys food and wine in a different way, having a critic say “I enjoyed drinking this” holds as much merit as me telling you that I’d prefer to not have to pay exorbitant fees for the pleasure of being self employed; precisely nothing other than my subjective opinion on a subject close to my heart. So, when a respected critic blind tastes a wine and assigns a score to it, it should be a reflection of the objective quality of the wine, usually judged along the lines of BLIC, and not a reference to style and/or preference. Obviously that means you need to read the tasting note that goes along with it rather than just blindly following numbers, as a 99 point Grand Cru Burgundy is no good to someone who wants something luscious, soft and accessible.
With that in mind, I decided to try and introduce this concept to Maestrazgo Wine Club as part of our monthly, international blind wine tasting. The tasting was themed around 3 pairs of wines, each made with the same grape variety (100%) but of different quality levels. For each wine, I was curious to know which one people thought was their favourite and also which one they thought was objectively a better wine. Now in hindsight, this was probably a little too much considering we rarely practice any sort of analytical tasting and it takes a certain amount of confidence to say “This wine is clearly not as good as the other, but I prefer it anyway”. Still, a fun tasting and of course we did the more enjoyable part of blind tasting as well; which grape is it made from, which country/region and so on. The wines we tasted are below and keep your eyes peeled for more blind tastings in the future (there will definitely be one in April!).
Pair 1: Girlan Chardonnay 2015 (Alto Adige, Italy) vs Hamilton Russel Vineyards Chardonnay 2015 (Walker Bay, South Africa)
Pair 2: Telmo Rodriguez Gazur 2013 (Ribera del Duero, Spain) vs Amaren 60 Reserva 2008 (Rioja, Spain)
Part 3: Produttori del Barbaresco Langhe Nebbiolo 2015 (Piedmont, Italy) vs Marco Abbona Barolo 2011 (Barolo, Italy)